The science case

The interplay Stellar activity and Exoplanets

Our immediate goal is to determine the activity and rotation of stars hosting planets, brown dwarfs, or other very low-mass dwarfs by following their light and colour curves. Do planets influence or even modulate the magnetic activity of its hosting solar-type star? Is the angular-momentum history of cool stars linked to the formation of planets? Is there another Earth?

Transit detections

For a planetary transit to happen, the observer must be very close to the plane of the orbiting planet. This is a very restrictive constraint because the probability of observing an Earth-Sun transit from a set of random orientations is just 0.5%. This implies a sample of 20,000 GKM dwarfs must be observed to allow for a statistically significant detection of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone. Stellar activity noise is likely to be the most severe limitation of our ability to detect planetary transits.

Three fields as pencil beams through the local galaxy

Are all types of variable stars distributed evenly throughout the galaxy, or are certain types at certain locations more abundant, e.g. at the edges of spiral arms than in the middle? Could such a pattern trace the star-formation history? Could we use spotted active stars as tracers of the history of kinematic moving groups? Or is there even a link between the distribution of magnetically active stars and the galactic dynamo? The proposed option is to select three sky fields, each to be observed continuously for about 100 consecutive nights. The directions of the fields are 1) near the galactic plane, 2) directly towards the celestial pole, and 3) near the galactiv pole. This should lead to pencil-beam statistics of stellar variability and improved planetary statistics in the local part of the Milky Way and complement the expected GAIA data.

Field 2, southern celestial pole